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Comment by awestroke | Hacker News Reader

Hilarious how they refuse to list memory (RAM) capacity of their phones. Probably because they are way behind other phones in that regard.

Which is weird, since they focus so much on on-device AI. I guess the very very slightly lower profit margin from including more RAM is incredible unpalatable.

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It’s because the OS needs far less ram than their competitors to function, and RAM uses electricity and costs money so it makes perfect sense to pack less of it - but they also know showing a lower number than their competitors would be interpreted as a failing by those that don’t understand this.

> It’s because the OS needs far less ram than their competitors to function

iOS doesn't magically need less RAM. It just aggressively kills background apps to stay within memory limits, then makes you wait while it reloads them from scratch (burning battery with CPU cycles and NVMe reads instead).

> RAM uses electricity and costs money so it makes perfect sense to pack less of it

No, it's bullshit. Apple kept RAM low to save money, not battery. They could easily pack 16gb with negligible effect on battery life.

I spent the better part of a decade using exclusively Androids. I rooted, installed custom ROMs and kernels that aimed to improve battery life. Aggressively checked for apps keeping my CPU in a wakelock, restricting the bad apps. And I never had good battery life.

Eventually I bought an iPhone, and even the 12 mini with its "tiny" battery, and putting in zero effort to extend battery life, it had significantly better endurance than any Android I ever owned. And its performance didn't get choppy after the first few months of use like every Android I owned.

The iPhone is almost 20 years old and you'd figure at some point everyone would realize stats and figures and hypothetical napkin math to prove "Android rules iPhone drools" doesn't make everyone's experience using them non-existent.

They don't reload them from scratch, for the most part. They force the app developers to design the app to serialize to disk at any point, and then rehydrate when needed. It actually makes developing for iOS much more of a pain in the ass, but it's great for users.

I’m sensing from your aggressive tone you’re emotionally invested in this? I don’t really think it’s worth trying to point out the ways in which you misinterpreted me, or the inaccuracies you’re bringing if you’re going to be like that.

I want an iPhone with a good siri and lots of memort for running AI models: medium frustration

I am tired or Apple fanboys being deathly afraid of criticizing Apple: high frustration.

You don't need to pick a side and then see everything black and white. I use apple products but I am not afraid of calling out Apple on bad decisions.

Considering how efficiently they utilize that "low on paper" RAM, I'm not complaining.

All the Apple iDevices I have contains comical amounts of RAM compared to other devices, yet they still can handle tons of tasks despite their age. While I'm pretty picky about RAM in my computers, I can't care less as long as my other iDevices works as advertised.

"Efficient" as in "kills apps immediately as soon as they are put in background" so that I constantly lose context in apps when multitasking

Even my "ancient" iPhone X does it so rarely, I don't lose any context. Even if it's happening more frequently than I notice, the apps also restore their contents.

macOS supports context restoration for 7-8 years now at least. iOS has inherited that soon after, so any application "killed", they SHOULD return to the state they exited, given they are implemented correctly.

Pretty sure they just use compressed memory and swap for apps that haven't been used in a while, similar to macOS.

Yup, 64GB iPhone 11 Pro still going strong. A wee bit slow however, so...a new 17? Have to upgrade eventually.

Always seemed to me like RAM value is much more irrelevant on phones since every app is sandboxed and uses APIs for background operations.

RAM is also always consuming battery, so there are reasons to minimize it. I wonder what the RAM usage efficiency is between iOS and Android in real-world, installed-app-usage usecases.

It’s also not in their best interest to give third party devs the signal to go hog wild on memory usage. Already a lot of cross platform shovelware eats 2x-3x RAM as much as it needs to, doesn’t respond to memory pressure notifications (apps are supposed to free up nonessential cache, etc when that happens), and push other backgrounded apps out of memory.

It’s important for on device LLMs.

The presentation specifically called out the iPhone 17 Pro having more memory...but did not elaborate, and the number is not in the tech specs.

It's rumored the Pro has 12GB RAM vs. 8GB for the other models.

Or the way around: they pack a lot of RAM, so everything is cached and feels faster.

No, they don't? This is the first time any of their models have more than 8gb

It's because since the invention of the iPhone ram has never been a concern of the customer. I've never considered it, or felt the need to.

It was an issue with earlier iPhones with the frequency it killed background apps/tabs.

The main incentive causing Apple to finally increase RAM is AI, with everything else being a good side effect.

Your apps constantly refresh despite only tabbing out to other apps for seconds. Super duper annoying and frustrating.

Mine don't.

This is demonstrably false to anyone with one of these devices. I can page over to my podcast app that I used days ago and find it is exactly where I left it.

Not sure why the downvotes, it's largely true. Almost every non-techie I encounter in real life incorrectly uses the term "memory" to mean storage space.

Is it really that incorrect? Flash memory is persistent storage. Memory cards used to be how game saves were stored on consoles. The M in ROM stands for memory.

So it seems like we're using the term memory too narrowly, rather than them using it incorrectly.

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